Virtual reality might be the future of entertainment, but you can experience it right now—and the absolute best way to live out your favourite game, watch an immersive VR movie, jump to a destination on the other side of the world or just spend time with friends in VR is through the Oculus Rift.
Not convinced? That’s fair. This is such a new technology that it can be difficult to grasp just how life-changing it can be. That’s why John Lewis is offering you the chance to come in and actually try out a unit in 12 of its shops across the UK, including London, Cambridge and York—with the unit itself on display in 13 other stores. More details can be found here.
The Oculus Rift is one of the great Kickstarter successes of our time—not that there are any other times in which Kickstarter was a thing, but you get the point. Asking for a mere $250,000 back in 2012, the small team behind the hardware managed to raise just under $2.5 million. Safe to say, the tech caught a lot of imaginations. Fast forward a few years and a couple of hardware revisions – oh, and the small matter of a $2 billion sale—and the final Rift hardware is finally with us. After all this waiting, the kit we’re left with is formidable and seriously impressive.
Sporting an OLED display with a resolution of 1080x1200 per eye (which comes together in your vision as a nifty 2160x1200 resolution), a 90hz refresh rate—meaning those below-60 frame rate dips are a thing of the past—and a 110-degree field of view, making the Rift a totally engrossing experience.
All of this comes together and is made that bit more engrossing thanks to the smart use of three dimensional space and audio. Moving your head around in the real world is recognised by the Rift and recreated in the game world, and as you—or anything else—move about in the game, the audio reacts how it should. It’s… very impressive, to put it lightly.
What this brings to the table is a brand new way to enjoy games, movies and a plethora of other absorbing activities. You can play something like EVE: Valkyrie and truly feel like you’re there, inside a starfighter as it darts between giant vessels and asteroid belts, dogfighting in the void of space.
You can scare yourself rotten—more than you thought you could be scared—with something like Edge of Nowhere. Or you can even live out your favourite bomb disposal fantasies (which we all have if we’ve ever watched Lethal Weapon) in the frantically excellent Keep Talking and No One Explodes.
There are plenty more games, of course, alongside cinematic viewing experiences that bring a whole new dimension to how we can watch movies—both traditional and made for VR. And there’s still so much more to come—so much more for developers and creatives to discover, and for Rift owners to enjoy. It’s the future, and it’s right now, and it’s amazing.
All of this power can be discovered at John Lewis shops across the UK, as well as online, allowing gamers and non-gamers alike the chance to experience the future of entertainment in one of the UK’s favourite stores.
As the Rift is on the cutting edge of the technological curve, there are system requirements to be able to run it smoothly. Rather than just reading a list of specs and cross referencing them, Oculus has released a tool which magically (alright, not magically) checks your system to see if it can handle the power of Rift’s VR fun-times.
You can, of course, make sure you have the best VR-ready equipment for your Rift by shopping at John Lewis’s dedicated VR-ready section, meaning you know for a fact you’re getting the right kit for your VR fun.
Interested? You can pick up your Oculus Rift right now from John Lewis, priced at £549 and with the peace of mind that comes with the company’s trademark two-year guarantee included at no extra cost. Check it out right here.
